Academia: the Last Refuge of the Coward

Seriously. There's all the joy of being able to rely on bullshit to get you through any career situation, without having to have any of the real creativity that the really professional liars (writers) do.

I'm currently in the middle of four major projects. One of these is my dissertation proposal, which is gonna be awesome because none of the people at my university of choice have done any work in it. I could make up all these damn books and they'd have no clue. Excellent. One of these projects is a conference paper about 50's B horror movies that I'm revamping so it actually matches the title when I present it next week. I really like the title. One is a conference paper I'm trying to write so I can write a proposal about it, though I guess I could always just do what I did last year, which is write a proposal for a paper that doesn't exist, then throw all the books in my runk, drive to the conference, and write the whole paper in the hotel room the day before. This one's mostly inspired by Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to work in a clip. And finally, because I have the attention span of a toaster, I'm doing some hot hot hot NaNoWriMo action. My novel is about zombies.

Academia's not just for cowards who can't face the real world. It's also for fandom refugees who finally moved out of their parents' basement but can't hang out with their old buddies any more because they "totally sold out" when they started investing all of their money in tuition rather than pewter figurines.